STEM & Robotics Courses

To successfully advance at competitions we need to understand two concepts - how to reliably and consistently navigate the field and position the robot exactly where we need it to be on every run, and how to build attachments that would accomplish a mission model once we have reached it. This course is focused on the first part. The second part is the whole FLLCasts platform, but start at FIRST LEGO League with LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor. "Challenge" competition for 9-16 years old. Check also the course for SPIKE Prime that was the inspiration for developing this one.

The goal of this course is the help you learn to program LEGO Robots using Scratch and make them behave consistently and reliably during competitions. As a language we use LEGO MINDSTORMS App Word Blocks which is based on Scratch. We look at a lot of concepts that could be used for FIRST LEGO League and World Robot Olympiad competitions - eg how to follow a line fast, slow, in a smooth way, with 5 states. Also how to align to lines, how to do double alignment, how to keep a straight line with motion sensor.

In this course, we demonstrate and explain example solutions for the FIRST LEGO League 2021-2022 Cargo Connect competition. Just like every year, we share solutions only after the season is over. In this course, you will find examples and principles of building attachments and will learn how to program consistent and reliable robots for each mission. You can follow the course, and as you go through each mission, try to replicate the solutions to understand the programs and explanations. Upon completion of the course, you will have many new ideas about how to approach the missions in every FLL robotics competition and how to help your team score more points.

Before starting this course, we suggest you go through the FIRST LEGO League robot game guide

Two concepts are important for robotics competitions - consistently navigate and position the robot exactly where we need it to be on the field, and builing attachments that would accomplish a mission once we have reached it. This course is focused on the first part. The second part is the whole FLLCasts platform, but start at FIRST LEGO League with LEGO Education SPIKE Prime. "Challenge" competition for 9-16 years old

The goal of this course is the help you learn to program LEGO Education SPIKE Prime robots to behave consistently and reliably during competitions. As a language we use LEGO Education SPIKE App Word Blocks which is based on Scratch. We look at a lot of concepts that could be used for FIRST LEGO League and World Robot Olympiad competitions - eg how to follow a line fast, slow, in a smooth way, with 5 states. Also how to align to lines, how to do double alignment, how to keep a straight line with motion sensor.

The goal of this course is to take you through some of the most useful principles for building and using attachments to accomplish missions at FIRST LEGO League competitions. The whole course is based on a LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor and you need a single 51515 set and without additional parts (you will need a second color sensor for the lessons for using two color sensors, but feel free to skip them if you don't have it). For every mission there is a Scratch and Python program attachment. The course consists of 25 lessons suitable for beginner and advanced students. Every lessons consists of a video tutorial demonstrating the principle and how the mission could be accomplished along with building instructions for the robot, the attachment and programs for controlling the robot.

This course presents Solutions and Review of the FIRST LEGO League 2021 RePlay competition and it uses LEGO MIndstorms Robot Inventor as a base. It is a mirror course to the LEGO Education SPIKE course for the same competition. For each mission in the competition the course contains the rules for the mission, a tutorial how to accomplish it, instructions for the robot that is used and instructions for the attachment that is used. Every lesson also contains a Scratch and a Python program for accomplishing the mission and of course a 10 out of 10 tutorial that demonstrated how reliable the approach is. Upon completion of the course you will have many new ideas about how to approach mission on every FLL robotics competition and how to help your team score more points.

This course presents Solutions and Review of the FIRST LEGO League 2020-2021 RePlay competition. We do such a course every year after the competition. By moving through the course lessons, building the robot and attachment and completing the missions you will learn how to achieve FLL mission following good engineering principles for building robots, attachments and developing programs. Upon completion of the course you will have many new ideas about how to approach mission on every FLL robotics competition and how to help your team score more points.

This is the most detailed course we've ever built on how to prepare for a FIRST LEGO League robotics competition and we've specifically focused on the use of LEGO Education SPIKE Prime as a simple Box Robot. The course consists of 25 lessons suitable for both beginner and advanced students. We build on the knowledge of 10 years of sharing example solutions with explanations for FIRST LEGO League robotics competitions.

This course is one of the popular courses in the FIRST LEGO League Robot Game. The Complete Guide. We recommend you also check out the whole guide.

You probably know that every year we're releasing a Solutions and Review course for the missions of FIRST LEGO League competitions challenges. This year the situation with the competition is a bit different, but here we are - sitting here, acting kinda normal, figuring out what robot should we build to accomplish every mission 10 times in a row.

Our goal with this course is to do a recap of FIRST LEGO League 2018-2019 Into Orbit competition. We'll show different solutions for some of the missions along with discussion on the approaches. We hope that a recap like this could help team prepare for next year. With available building instructions, ready to use programs this course is perfect for exercise on the missions from the competition.

The FLL season is great, but has one disadvantage - it ends. We have prepared that course for those of you that does not want to stop! The course presents a whole new challenge with custom designed field and mission models, that can be built from just 2 LEGO Mindstorms EV3 sets (core+resource). It is a great way to keep the momentum going after the end of the FLL season and prepare in the best way possible for the next.

Become the best remote control driver at VEX IQ competitions. Test your skills in a number of challenges now. Pass them successfully and become a "Class R1" driver.

The goal of "FLLCasts Certified VEX Driver - Class R1" is to certify your abilities to remotely control a VEX IQ robot. Everything is prepared for you. The course book contains a robot to build, remote control program to download and challenges to complete. If you complete each challenge below a certain time, and prove it, you will receive the "FLLCasts Certified VEX Driver - Class R1" certificate. 

Find the Complete Guide at VEX IQ Robotics Competition

The first level of the course book is currently available for a free as it is in a Pre-release.

After the great success of the previous two Box Robots Courses (Box Robot 1 and Box Robot 2) we are improving the construction even further showing one more way to build Box Robots and to resolve some of the challenges that we all had with the previous robots. 

Of course attachments are a great topic of the robots. We show the general way in which one is to build attachments with the Knob Wheels and Gear Wheels mechanisms. 

This course collects some of the resources that we have on Football and how to plat football with LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robots. It is not a full fledged course, but it makes it easy to find the two building instructions for the Goalkeeper and for the Striker and the program that goes with them.

There comes a time when you need to program the robot to "follow a line, but if another sensor detects something you would like to stop, do some work, and then continue following the line". This is applicable to competition robots as it is applicable to real-life robots. 

There comes the State Machine Pattern. An advanced and very powerful concept that allows you to easily implement complex robot behaviours with a simple, well-organized, extensible, bug-free program where the robot could be in 1,2, 10 or 100 states and you will still be able to manage the complexity of the world around the robot.    

In this course, we would like to introduce you to multi-purpose attachments. These are attachments designed to accomplish a number of missions when the robot goes out of the base in the FIRST LEGO League competitions. 

You've all seen them. They are kind of large, powered by a few motors and sometimes use rubber bands, levers and other mechanisms. 

Use the course as a preseason preparation and try to solve the tasks to prepare for next year competition. Even if you don't have the field, build the attachments and follow the tasks to inspect their behaviour. Modify them as needed when said.  

This is the first draft of the course including only the attachments in different sections. If you are interested in learning more please enrol in the course and in the next few weeks we would try to record the video tutorials.

One of the most controversial topics when it comes to LEGO Mindstorms robots is how to make them move in a straight line. This is a problem that has caused a lot of confusion among teachers, parents, rookie teams and students. The robot makes about 2-3 centimetres error for every meter, which is about an inch for every 3-4 feets. In this course, I would like to discuss the different ways in which you can improve the behaviour of the robot and how you could make it move in a straight line with the help of the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Gyro Sensor.

This course is a collection of materials for many of the attachments that we've built at FLLCasts before introducing courses. The videos were built as separate different attachments for different competitions and with the following course, we try to give it a structure.

The course contains a number of sections with specific examples and tasks on how you could improve your FIRST LEGO League (FLL) robot game in order to achieve more points. It is designed mostly for after season teams that would like to prepare for next year, but could also work for teams that are currently working on their competition robots.

Designed to get students started with VEX EDR and RobotC. The robotics set is not very easy to use and offers its challenges. In the course we take a step-by-step approach to moving, turning and using sensors. A big part of the course is about programming and using the RobotC software for the Cortext controller. 

This course is still under development and constantly change and extended.

After the first box robot course and its enormous success, we decided to build a second box robot. This time with fewer parts and with only three motors. The EV3 set comes with one medium motor and this robot will be easier for new teams. It is also lighter and more simple. Take the course and learn the ideas that we have in mind in simplifying a robot. Use this course with students and try to experiment to make the attachments and construction even simpler.

Robotics competitions with LEGO Mindstorms robots are very popular. One of the more popular types of robot constructions that are build for such competitions are the so-called "Box Robots". In this course we are gathering a series of videos on this box robots along with building instructions and recommendations of improvements.

This course if used by teams, mentors and students to structure the preparation for the Robotics Game of the FIRST LEGO League Robotics Competitions. One thing that is common each year at FLL is that experience matters a lot. Our goal with this course is to quickly bring new teams up to speed with experienced teams and to share some new tricks, patterns, constructions with the more experienced teams.

You must dive. You must count. You must release. Well, not exactly you, but the robot. In this playlist we present an example solution to the WRO 2015 challenge along with some nice constructions for releasing balls while counting them with a robot. That sounds pretty easy, but could get quite challenging when the number of balls is large.

Moving in a grid of objects. That's the large challenge of the World Robotics Olympiad 2015 Junior-High 2015. It's called Treasure Hunt. In this playlist we present an example solution to it. In the first video we would build a robot that can collect the boxes (treasures). The robot would also be able to move around the treasures.

These are a couple of structured examples and tutorials of how the missions for FIRST LEGO League 2015 Trash Trek competition could be accomplished. We've gathered recordings and explanations from which students and teacher can learn a lot. There are missions and attachment for dropping, carabiner, loops and other interesting and challenging robotics missions from the competition.